As an aside, I volunteer at a little railroad museum where we offer train rides on antique narrow-gauge equipment. And I'm the same way there: I have zero interest in being an engineer, or to even "toot the horn." I'm perfectly content to stand trackside and watch the train roll by. Occasionally I might be tasked with throwing a turnout, but that's about as involved as I'll get. Why did I join? So I could work on restoring and maintaining the equipment. A recent achievement was being able to disassemble, service and reassemble solid journal bearings—no trivial job. I am also responsible for the diesel's electrical system, right down to refurbishing and recalibrating all of the relays and related gear. (Sadly I've had to leave the group owing to my poor health.) This is a long-winded way of saying I'm a roundy-rounder, both in the model and real worlds. And I don't care what anyone thinks of that.
My track plan is designed expressly to serve this purpose: it's a single-track dogbone (red line) nested inside a simple oval (blue line).
The concept is to allow two trains to run independently. Because it's not possible to leave a DC-type locomotive running continuously on the dogbone, the
layout required some electronics, consisting of train detectors and latching relays to control track polarity as well as the the positions of the loop turnouts.
The entire electrical control system is shown below; it's just a wee bit more complicated than it needs to be because I included manual overrides for the automated
part of the system on the chance I might want to shuffle equipment around on my own. (Yellow relays are latching type.)
And below is the control panel that runs the whole layout. All that's missing from this image are two homemade PWM throttles.
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